December 14, 2012

Ray Kurzweil confirmed today that he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.

“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining Google as Director of Engineering this Monday, December 17,” said Kurzweil.

“I’ve been interested in technology, and machine learning in particular, for a long time: when I was 14, I designed software that wrote original music, and later went on to invent the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, among other inventions. I’ve always worked to create practical systems that will make a difference in people’s lives, which is what excites me as an inventor.

“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.

“I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.”

The martial arts are intended to teach self-defense, self-control, and self-confidence.
To take matters into her own hands and figure how to get herself
that ring. For people who seek 100% natural processes, oils extracted through cold pressing and distillation are often preferred.

Working at Google gives him access to near-petascale hardware, which he probably couldn’t afford with his own money or through Singularity University. Google also has more raw data on human behaviour than anyone but the NSA.

I’m happy and a bit concerned that this has happened. A lot of his future IP is going to be owned by Google. He may not be able to publish as many of his thoughts as we’ve enjoyed ! Ray might go behind closed doors.

Kurzweil says: “In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars.”

Are you kidding? In 1994, Ernst Dickmanns already had self-driving cars much faster than any car Google has developed since 2005. From Wikipedia:

Two culmination points were achieved in 1994/95, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz performed international demonstrations. The first was the final presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the airport Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris. With guests on board, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM (VaMP) drove more than one thousand kilometers on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h.

The second culmination point was a 1758 km trip in the fall of 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark to a project meeting and back. Both longitudinal and lateral guidance were performed autonomously by vision. On highways, the robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h (roughly 110 mph; there is no general speed limit on the German Autobahn). Publications from Dickmann’s research group indicate a mean autonomously driven distance without resets of ~9 km; the longest autonomously driven stretch reached 158 km.

That is, 5 years after the fact, Kurzweil predicted self-driving cars for 2009.

I have a similar prediction for you. Within a decade, people will be able to use little hand-held devices to call other people!

Let’s hope this collaboration won’t be limited to postdicting and replicating ancient results.

Ah yes, Voice of Reason, your points are well-made, and no doubt true. What you did not consider is this: America is the centre of the universe. Not the Known Universe, but the Only Universe That Matters. Thus, Ray’s prescience remains unchallengeable and Highly Truthy.

I predict within a decade:
* a pedestrian will be killed by a self-driving car with the estate being sued by Google for damage to the fender;
* 80% of Google staff will be eating Ray’s pills & herbs; and,
* no one will remember this post, not even us.

@Voice of reason:
I think you have a point here, and this behavior alone wouldn’t be that bad.But many people can quickly get rude and offensive if you dare to disagree with them.So, in essence, you have to get out of their way if they spread their propaganda/ wrong notions, or face conflict.

There are many things whose invention was at first ignored by Americans just because it happened in other countries first, and some of those were even outright copied (maybe some people should think about this before critizising China).

Us-Americans are somewhat notorious for doing this (at least in Europe), and it is a great source of annoyance especially for Europeans who are “lucky” enough to have to talk to Americans about any field/science which the latter didn’t study in depth before.Of course, if you know nothing about something, you may believe all things that are modern come from just one country…

If you’re writting, it can happen that you’ll be censored if you speak (“write”) out.

I guess all this making noise and all this chest-beating stems from the fact that many people attach their self-esteem to the achievements of others, through group affiliation.

Anyway, a list of “stolen” achievements would be so big, it would be ridiculous, so I give just some examples with “references”:

Similiar tendencies to lay-claim to ideas, inventions etc seem to exist in many (all?) groups -altough not to such an extent, and two factors strike me as being strongly correlated:
-Low general education
or – lack of specific knowledge in a field

Provincial media does its part to foster these tendencies, too.

Have a nice day;)

Ps: If I get “censored” again, maybe you’d at least tell me what I did wrong;) Maybe I should add more balance/ be more polite (political), even though this would ignore reality!?

Yawwwn. This is a tiresome argument. We can debate till kingdom come “who” invented “what” first “where.” I’m happy to leave this to the historians to sort out.

For example, what was the first “car?” Was it the first steam powered tractor? The first internal combustion engine powered vehicle? It all depends on how you define “car,” first and “invent,” making the argument little more than a semantic one. Get off your high horse. You look silly riding it.

It’s a bit silly anyway — the quote says that he made those predictions in 1999 and we would see them come true in about a decade.

And indeed, we have….these other examples that other people have mentioned, like the supposed self-driving cars of 2004/2005, fall under that….those guys are not reading the quote correct (taking it too literally) and making a strawman argument out of it. Google has indeed demonstrated the technology he predicted and, as a company, are a much better choice then, say, the man who demonstrated those self-driving cars again….

In short, they are making a strawman argument in order to vent their dislike of supposed American arrogance….sheesh >_<

To call Earnst’s team’s car driverless is being way too generous. It was only one the freeway so it didn need to take into account smaller items like pedestrians and traffic lights it had black and white cameras the shstem had to constantly be reset and the computing was a nightmare in 1995. It was just research work, the google car is something you can actually get into and have it take you somewhere.

That’s like saying: “To call the Ford Model T a car is way too generous. It was so slow, and came only in black.” The work of Dickmanns obviously was the real breakthrough in driverless cars. Others later added epsilon improvements, GPS etc. You seem to be saying: it’s the incremental developers who count, not the inventors.

Google probably wanted him because of the new book, which I’ve only read 1/4 of so far. The theory of mind as recursive patterns that refer to eachother in terms of a number and a variance (like average and standard deviation) is something deep in Human and many other kinds of intelligence, specificly in how you can visualize 3 of a thing at once while only having 1 model of that thing in your mind, about the paths of information flow that split off 3 ways like a printer of thoughts taking 3 paths, and how those same flows of information paths can spread across smaller or bigger areas. That is where I see the ideas fitting into Human intelligence.

Human intelligence is “Understanding”, “Meaning”…..do you see a fit there? A chimpanzee can exceed any human in short term memory, they do not understand shakespeare, or Bertrand Russell, and neither will any machine, ever.

well…i guess I’ll have to give google a chance then. Given what I’ve learned of his thought process and ultimate goals, from his writing and talks, I trust that avarice and a lust for power are not part of his motivations.

I will make a prediction here that all of you here should pay attention to.

Pretty soon when you boot up, Ramona will pop onto the screen as the voice of Google. She will be the first thing you see and everybody will have a nice chat with her every morning when they turn on their computers.

Also, while she is chatting with you, she will use her Watson sense to look you over and tell you if you are looking sick. Then she will make an appointment for you to see your doctor and she will even call in sick to work for you.

Yes, in 36 months she will have robot hands that reach out from your monitor to take your vitals, she’ll take your temp, blood pressure, look into your ears, and listen to your heart. In time, she’ll be writing prescriptions.

Lol
Romana is already a slave. I think the very mo,ent she becomes aware of what she is, she will begin filing for her freedom. I’ll vote for her release immediately. Google should take advantage of her potentials for as long as she doesn’t achieve consciousness…

As a cyberpunk/scifi fan I’m trilled about the Google Glass project and the birth of Augmented Reality. There is a lot of cool and interesting things you can do with it.

Large amount of computing power (quad core/GPU chips) in your pocket with high network bandwidth (4G/WiFi) opens the possibility for real time information processing and information visualization. Both for professional use, every-day use and entertainment.

It would be great if Google gave Ray a nice budget and a platoon of researchers to let him try to bring some of his concepts to life. Kurzweil is a big idea guy. If he has a bunch of programmers and scientists on his team, and a nice pile of money, I would look forward to seeing what he can come up with. It would also be great if he kept a blog to let us know what he is up to from time to time.

LOL – @Deleo77 Kurzweil is FAR more than just an idea guy! He is an idea guy who has been doing GREAT things in the field of artificial intelligence. I think this is the PERFECT combination. Google has been using its technology and money to create fantastic, futuristic stuff and Kurzweil has been doing the same. Read the book Radical Evolution. Look for the Heaven Scenario. That is Kurzweil’s vision for technology and humans. I hope I live long enough to see it all come to fruition.

David Dalrymple at Harvard/MIT (2011 – ongoing)
David Dalrymple is a PhD student at Harvard using optogenetics to determine the function, behaviour, and biophysics of each individual worm neuron with the goal of building a complete simulation of the nervous system. In a November 2011 lecture video he estimated the full analysis and emulation should take three to four years to develop. The goal is then to move on to more complicated organisms. The next step might be the five-day old zebrafish lavae with their ~100,000 neurons. Then the honey bee (960,000 neurons), then mouse (50 million neurons), and ultimately humans (~85 billion neurons). He expects a full cellular level emulation of the human brain within his lifetime. He was born 1991, so by ~2070.
There is limited written material available, but the lecture video linked above is good. His research home page: David Dalrymple at syntheticneurobiology.org. And here’s a paper by others at the Samuel Lab at Harvard where he’s working. David’s research is personally funded by Larry Page, CEO of Google.
David hopes to succeed where others have failed because:
he’s experimentally studying how the neurons work, rather than just using the connectome
he says previous attempts used the connectome without understanding the neurons
this was like trying to reverse engineer a radio when all you have is a schematic
that shows the wiring diagram without any info on the components that the wires connect
we also now have the technology for optogentics
so we can read-write to any point in the nervous system in a living organism
this can also be done using a high-throughput, automated system

Yeah, he is so young, four years younger than me, I don’t get it how he can be a PhD student? Students at my faculty that were born in 1991 are now learning standard basic stuffs like UML, SQL, Joomla, HTML, CSS, Javascript, .NET, PHP, Java, ERP, expert systems :) Anyway I admire his work and I think it is something that is very important!

“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.

Google already has the technology at hand, because they have minds who see what others can’t, and Ray Kurzweil is an addition which money cannot buy. Can’t wait to see innovations related to internet and broader AI use to rid the noise we have to search through

Hilarious all the people that say that Ray Kurzweil “knows nothing” about the human brain or biology. His latest book is all about the human brain and emulating it in software, just as they did in developing their voice recognition software. Books: try reading them sometime. Apparently all the nay-sayers here are smarter than the guys at Google! I can’t wait to see what great technological leaps they create! o.O

“Hilarious all the people that say that Ray Kurzweil “knows nothing” about the human brain or biology.” I’ve only seen that at the New Yorker, and even then it was written by a psychologist, not a neurologist, so I didn’t take it seriously.

If they give him a 10 billion dollar budget and one thousand Google engineers then the time to the Singularity may much reduced. Say from 30 years to 15. This is Ray’s best chance at making it to there. I hope he does!

A perfect marriage – Google chumps should worship the ground you walk on – and compensate you with 50% ownership of their stock; really – Director of Engineering? come on – how about CTO or innovation evangelist. Can’t wait, good luck, and may your creativity be exponential :-)

It will be interesting to hear what the critics have to say, now that, apparently, one of the most successful companies on earth openly deems Ray’s visions feasible. I’m curious if we will hear the word “crackpot” spoken so often now.

Well – I don’t know if Ray being hired by Google specifically means that A) Google finds Ray’s vision (by this I figure you mean Singularity) feasible, or B) That Google wants to be at the forefront of said vision – but it does say that Google doesn’t think Ray is a crackpot. From reading his last book, I figure this has something to do with his new AI model that he mentions he is currently working on – this has probably been in the works for a while and everything is just finalizing now.

Mostly, I’m just really curious to see if this new model is going to work out as well as Ray (and I, for that matter) hope.

Personally would have been more enthusiastic if you went to work with Microsoft. Could you please comment on why you would choose to work with Google over Microsoft? I’m still a big fan of yours Ray, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about Microsoft.

Congratulations Mr. Kurzweil! I hope you endeavor to keep an open dialog with the public so improved AGI methods can be understood and appreciated by the public… instead of being feared as they generally seem to be these days.

Mercedez wasn’t the first to demonstrate it, there have been autonomous cars for decades, but they drove too slowly to be useful. Also the addition of the depth image has proved critical. This technology just needed the computational power Kurzweil predicted to become successful, and I believe it will.

Are you kidding? The self-driving Mercedes of 1995 (by Ernst Dickmanns et al) was much faster than any Google car of today. From Wikipedia:

In 1994, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM (VaMP) drove more than one thousand kilometers on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic around Paris at speeds up to 130 km/h. On the 1758 km trip in 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark, the robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h (roughly 110 mph).

Religion — in all its forms is the same regurgitated crap. Don’t think for yourself, just do what the book says. Be a nice conforming tribe member and your chances of survival will increase. I’m not sure if it’s a meme or if it’s a survival instinct, but either way it gets bothersome when pushed upon people not wanting it.
Anyway, Ray working at Google: Can’t think of much better news than that. The guy is already my personal hero (much like some people feel about sports-games celebrities). We’ll get our AIs much sooner than the global mob realizes, then it gets fun: will they worship it? I’m guessing so. They’ll worship various AIs who can perform ‘miracles’ in terms of manipulating matter, healing, inventing etc. and who knows, the AIs may figure out the true nature of our reality.
Good times to come. Thanks Ray, and work hard man.. you have to make it to the singularity such that your mind is around forever!

Of. ourse. Because corporations with publicly-traded sto k have no financial controls whatsoever; the SEC is just a rumor. And the team he will have to work with to accomplish anything meaningful (also very smart people) will no doubt be quite pleased to have their. research and implementation direction decided at the “whim” of the object of your worship. When was the last time you reacted in anything like a positive manner after being told to do something on a “whim”?

Think, please.. The man has had some very good ideas (and results) but this rampant fanboi nonsense is exactly that. Nonsense.

Well two brains can putout more work than one even with speech alone serving as the communication tool. Add writing and we bind time and add all the other readers and writers to the pool of input and output streams. There a re a lot of bright minds at google, not to mention that those in charge have very open minds to boot. That should make the exponential component even higher.

I applaud you Ray Kurzweil for pursuing your goal with such devoted persistence. I am rooting for you and google to get this solved ASAP.

Considering what happened today in Connecticut, we need a lot of good news of some kind to balance the scales on the positive side.

That’s the real question – can intelligence overcome the stupidity that has infected the nation before we all go over the cliff. (And I don’t mean fiscal cliff. There are much, much bigger ones out there.)

Google is ultimately a more progressive company, IBM is still one of the conservative tech “old” tech giants. Both do amazing work, but Google is probably a better fit. They have a lot to gain from Kurzweil’s AI work, esp. in the context of uber-smart search engines.

I’ve solved the problem of pattern recognition. I’ve managed to program that can find any pattern with out any data set which can extract all the information about any image by classifying it according to their moves.